Pernicious Politics: Mimetic Rivalry
Steven Alan Samson
12/9/2020 9:46:00 AM - Steven Alan Samson
To better understand the futile ways people react to partiality, oppression, and injustice, it is useful to introduce the French literary scholar René Girard’s concepts of mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry, which he developed in the first chapter of I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, among other places. Drawing on Scripture as well as the great novelists, Girard finds expressed in this literature a dynamic process that drives human motivation.
We seek what we desire. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, among others, called this desire “appetite.” The accounts of Eve and Cain in Genesis 3-4 may be carefully read to see how desire is characterized and the consequences it can entail. Girard contends that desire takes the place of instinct in humans. Unlike an instinct, it is non-specific rather than predetermining. Its essence is to have no essential goal. Instead, we borrow or learn our desires from other people, who model for us what is desirable through their desires. From infancy we derive our own desires through imitation. This is what Girard calls mimetic desire.
The only culture really ours is not that into which we are born; it is the culture whose models we imitate at the age when our power of assimilation is the greatest. If the desire of children were not mimetic, if they did not of necessity choose for models the human beings who surround them, humanity would have neither language nor culture. If desire were not mimetic, we would not be open to what is human or what is divine.
Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are a ransom of our freedom.
Those discords are apt to arise when we desire or covet the same thing possessed and modeled by another, thus provoking mimetic rivalry that leads to persecution and scapegoating.
This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger the harmony and even the survival of all human communities. Rivalristic desires are all the more overwhelming since they reinforce one another. The principle of reciprocal escalation and one-upmanship governs this type of conflict...
Few circumstances are as harrowing as the eclipse of a society at war with itself. In the opening chapter of The Scapegoat, Girard cited a medieval account of a massacre of Jews accused of poisoning wells. Something is amiss in this tirade against the Jews. Hidden from view to contemporaries, the events actually coincided with the spread of the Black Death into the area.
In his analysis, Girard identifies “stereotypes of persecution,” including accusations of such monstrous crimes as parricide, treason, and incest. Typically, the indulgence of such accusations, rightly understood, reveals the lies and coverups that conceal scapegoating and persecution. Given the mimetic nature of desire, human relationships are fragile and easily bruised. Families and communities tend to protectively circle the wagons to fend off attacks. To keep the peace, blame may be redirected outside the immediate community, whether upon cross-border rivals, resident minorities, regional outliers, or marginal insiders, such as political or religious leaders. Ostracism is named after the ancient Athenian practice of exiling its (often) best leaders.
Girard makes an acute observation here: “Ethnic and religious minorities tend to polarize the majorities against themselves.” He notes that few very societies “do not subject their minorities, all the poorly integrated or merely distinct groups, to certain forms of discrimination and even persecution.” Yet there is an irony here. People are bothered less by visible difference than by an unsettling lack of difference. Thomas Sowell has noted that successful middleman minorities, who provide valuable but underappreciated services, have historically been subject to considerable envy and discrimination. At many times and places, clothing, yellow badges, hair braids, zoning, redlining, and other identifiers have been imposed in order to set apart the lower or undervalued orders of society, rendering their lives even more precarious.
In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard tied mimetic desire directly to Biblical accounts, especially the Gospels. “The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one’s neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.” Mimetic desire for the same object may spark envy and rivalry, threatening to spread a contagion of reprisals, especially in small or isolated social units. The one constant factor is the neighbor: “One always desires whatever belongs to that one, the neighbor.” It is the neighbor who gives it value.
The Bible also reveals how vulnerable people are to repetitive and addictive criminal, subversive, or tyrannical temptations. We ordinarily seek to bask in the glory of this world but it is “a glory that multiplies scandals as it makes its way.” What Girard calls “the double idolatry of self and other” is the “principal source of human violence” and tends to contaminate third parties “who are just as addicted as we are to the entanglements of mimetic rivalries.” The consequences are of biblical proportions: “Mimetic rivalries can become so intense that the rivals denigrate each other, steal the other’s possessions, seduce the other’s spouse, and, finally, they even go as far as murder.”
By revealing the scapegoat mechanisms that divide and rule over human society, Girard contends that the Bible uniquely and unsparingly tells the truth about the clay feet and even the crimes upon which human institutions are founded.
‘Woe to the one by whom scandal comes!’ Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal. The more the imitation is innocent and trusting, the more the one who imitates is easily scandalized, and the more the seducer is guilty of abusing this innocence.
Hobbes recognized much the same reality – focusing instead on the potential for anyone to treacherously kill anyone else. He regarded it as a consequence of human equality in a pre-political “state of nature,” characterized as a state of war “of every man, against every man.” René Girard used the term mimetic contagion to describe this unfortunate condition, noting that violence is often purged only through an act of sacrifice, as when a scapegoat is identified, accused, and cast out. Similarly, what Bastiat called legal plunder creates resentments that may lead to universal plunder. Echoing Edmund Burke, former Speaker of the House Robert Winthrop declared: "men […] must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the Word of God, or the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.”
Man is a moral agent with the power to choose, including his models and ideals. Our rights of life, liberty, and property are forever intertwined with personal character and political courage.